Cast aside your bearings, ye fixed axle faithful, and join us as we take a step into horizontal responsive tricks. This may sound like a daunting challenge, as neither horizontal nor responsive play are particularly easy, but we can use stalls to make response work to our advantage with a maneuver called the UFO Recapture.

When a yo-yo is spinning, it’s going to tend to stay spinning in the orientation you threw it thanks to centripetal force. Stalls are neat, though, because they give us the opportunity to swing or rotate a yo-yo however we want, which lets us change directions mid-sequence.

The UFO Recapture is all about throwing the yo-yo out horizontally to a UFO (aka Sleeping Beauty or Flying Saucer) and then capturing it back in a sidestyle stall mount. In its purest form, this is accomplished with a horizontal throw, popping the UFO’ing yo-yo up so that it starts to respond, and then intercepting the yo-yo with the string so that it falls into a stall. The most difficult part of the trick is getting your string lined up and your timing right, remember to take it slow and hook your finger around the string.

Before you try this, you’re probably going to want to be pretty comfortable with the basics of sideways yo-yoing so you can get a good solid throw, but there aren’t many string hits to be seen, so no worries if you don’t quite have your sideways braintwister combo on lock yet. (hey, I still don’t have one!) The biggest difference between frontstyle & a sidestyle spin for recaptures is that a frontstyle power throw has the yo-yo coming back towards the front of the string and the sidestyle breakaway has it coming behind the string. I personally consider frontstyle easier to learn, but try both.

Oh, also, at 23 seconds in: if you do a horizontal broadway it helps you set up a double-or-nothing, which you can then recapture, but that’s probably a little more on the advanced end of things.

28 seconds in marks my personal favorite way to practice the recapture, which pairs it with a dumptruck-style half-swing from a trapeze stall into a UFO. This technique is one of the easiest ways to get into a horizontal trick with a fixie, because you already have control of the string once you restart, and I’ve used it in a number of tricks (one of which can be seen at the end of Mystical.) When you pair it up with the recapture, it can effectively become a repeater, which means you always know a way into and out of horizontal spin from trapeze stall—score! Adam Brewster did some neat things with this as well.

Immediately after the half-dumptruck/recapture is a silly little trick called “knockbacks” you can learn to mix it up, wherein you just bounce the yo-yo off your palm to reset the regen, tough love style… and after that is an even sillier trick, proving that you can catch it in a thumb mount and broadway out. Or not broadway out! But really, who doesn’t want more spin moves?

At 1:05, we take a break from the UFOs to explore a mount we haven’t talked about much on FF: the fake triangle stall. Pulling the string through the loop on a trapeze stall creates a fake triangle suitable for really big suicide loops, something that I used to my advantage with this weird semi-horizontal offplane monster, based heavily on Paul Yath’s 360 suicide. Ideally it would be even more horizontal, but it sure is nice not having to keep the momentum afterwards. After that, we have another suicide trick that shows you more ways to use horizontal tricks to create pauses: this shifts the plane by intercepting a kickflip suicide halfway through, tossing a whip loop over it, and then continuing into a mach-5 mount.

Finally, we close out the video with a cross-armed 1.5 stall pushed out around the arm into a UFO and recaptured in a double or nothing stall. Going around your arm and keeping the string structure clean isn’t easy with a responsive yo-yo, but the feeling is totally awesome, so I recommend at least giving the entrance a shot.